Businesses and users are increasingly storing corporate, confidential, or sensitive data on personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, laptops, and other mobile devices that are not properly protected within the confines of a secure building or secure network at all times. Without the proper data protections, a thief has potential access to sensitive information, such as corporate financial data, word documents, and private client information stored on such mobile devices. The value of the lost or stolen data is typically much higher than the value of the physical asset upon which it is stored. Even within the confines of a secure building, there are reasons and needs to protect and to be able to recover sensitive information stored on desktops, laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, and other computing devices (hereinafter, collectively, “computing devices”).
Protecting and securing data is also a high legislative priority, as evidenced by numerous laws that have been passed by Congress for many industries. For example, in the financial industry, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act addresses the collection and disclosure of personal financial information by financial institutions. It requires all financial institutions to design, implement, and maintain safeguards to protect customer information. A customer's confidential and financial electronic documents are usually maintained in a storage database. The database security compliance obligations required by the Act include continual monitoring of data and the review and management of permissions granted to the database. Other laws and regulations such as Payment Card Industry security protection initiative, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Canadian Personal Information Protection and the Electronic Documents Act require information protection and strict security for electronic documents.
Further, most organizations do not have policies or procedures to effectively implement disaster recovery for computing devices that are lost, stolen, or that are disabled. Typically, a user has to initiate and take affirmative actions to backup data to a separate data storage medium, such as DVD, memory chip, or network storage device. This process is inefficient, time consuming, and only sporadically followed. Because every user of a computing device does not backup stored data on a regular or frequent enough basis, information may not be recoverable if the computing device is lost, stolen, or destroyed. If this happens, the organization loses not only hardware and software, which are typically replaceable, but essential data that has not been backed up, which may not be as easily, if at all, replaceable.
For all of the above reasons, there is a need for systems and methods to protect sensitive, confidential, or important information from foreseeable threats or loss.
There is a further need for systems and methods that provide access control to computing devices, especially when they are “in the field” and not within a secure or protected environment, wherein such systems and methods include some or all of the following capabilities: authentication, authorization, reporting, compliance-checking, remotely controlling, communicating, controlling bandwidth and computing resource usage, monitoring user actions, allowing and disallowing any and all input and output methods per flexible criteria (which may include, but are not limited to: content, name, date, timestamp, user, type), logging, addressing, powering up and down, sharing, collaborating and auditing protocols.
There is a need for systems and methods to protect and backup corporate and confidential data stored on computing devices associated with an enterprise.
There is a need for systems and methods that enhances privacy, security and disaster readiness for an organization's computing devices.
There is a further need for systems and methods providing centralized management, security, and backing-up of computing devices.
There are further needs for systems and methods that facilitate the transfer and storage of data from a computing device in a secure and efficient manner.
There is yet a further need for systems and methods for providing centralized management that incorporates off-site back-up recovery, computing device data recovery, end point protection, disk encryption, device disablement, post theft protection, and data leak protection.